I have serious, serious issues with avoidance. I would like some advice on how to improve, as I suspect it is significantly holding me back.
Some examples of what I mean
Checked replies so far, no one has given you the right answer.
Whenever you don't do something, you have a reason for not doing it.
If you find yourself stuck in a cycle of intending to do, and not doing, it's always because you're not taking your reason for NOT doing it seriously; you're often habitually ignoring it.
When you successfully take your reasons for not doing something seriously, either you stop wanting to do it, or you change how you're doing it, or your reason for not doing it simply goes away.
So, what does it mean/look like to take your reason ...
Some people think that personally significant numbers cropping up in their daily lives is some kind of meaningful sign. For instance, seeing a license plate with their birth year on it, or a dead friend’s old house number being the price of their grocery shop.
I find myself getting very irritated with family members who believe this.
I don’t think anybody reading this is the kind of person who needs to read it. But these family members are not the kind of person who would read an explanation of why it’s ridiculous, and I’m irritated enough that I...
I'm not sure that focusing on the outcomes makes sense when thinking about the psychology of individual soldiers. Presumably refusal was rare enough that most soldiers were unaware of what the outcome of refusal was in practice. I think it would probably be rational for soldiers to expect severe consequences absent being aware of a specific case of refusal going unpunished.
o3 lies much more blatantly and confidently than other models, in my limited experiments.
Over a number of prompts, I have found that it lies, and when corrected on those lies, apologies, and tells some other lies.
This is obviously not scientific, more of a vibes based analysis, but its aggressive lying and fabricating of sources is really noticeable to me in a way it hasn’t been for previous models.
Has anyone else felt this way at all?
Apparently, some (compelling?) evidence of life on an exoplanet has been found.
I have no ability to judge how seriously to take this or how significant it might be. To my untrained eye, it seems like it might be a big deal! Does anybody with more expertise or bravery feel like wading in with a take?
Link to a story on this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/science/astronomy-exoplanets-habitable-k218b.html
Note: I am extremely open to other ideas on the below take and don't have super high confidence in it
It seems plausible to me that successfully applying interpretability techniques to increase capabilities might be net-positive for safety.
You want to align the incentives of the companies training/deploying frontier models with safety. If interpretable systems are more economically valuable than uninterpretable systems, that seems good!
It seems very plausible to me that if interpretability never has any marginal benefit to capabilities, the little nuggets o...
Got over my avoidance of responding to replies here after a bit :)
I've tried a lot of self-help flavoured stuff (atomic habits etc.) before and it hasn't worked, and Focusing seemed quite different. I've given it a go and I think I'll try and work a bit more with it. After just a short session, I feel like I gained a significant insight, that I have a crippling fear of "being in trouble" that manifests as a tightness in my lower chest, and seems to activate a lot when I think about specific things I'm avoiding. Thanks for the resources, and the new way of looking at the problem.